How is your spring different this year? More in-person gatherings seem to be happening with every passing month. We both just returned last week from facilitating workshops for the University of Victoria in British Colombia, including our new workshops around the growth mindset in academia.
Wow—it was both so energizing and so tiring to be all together again in person! We noticed that more conversations happened around the workshops both between delegates and with us. We noticed that it was easier to give and get feedback during the workshops. We noticed that learning together is so fun and fulfilling in-person, and we had missed it more than we knew!
As we continue to travel in the coming months for other sessions across Canada, we will be sharing our work on the growth mindset with both professional organizations and entire Faculties, and that is really energizing too. We hope to see you soon face-to-face!
At our workshops, we were reminded that the challenges of academic work are never-ending. While this work is both fun and engaging for us, to do our newish jobs well, we have to be effective not only at managing our other work, but those parts of our work that don’t immediately get our pulse racing. Like email.
Email is as vital as it is mundane.
While none of us came into our careers to do more email, it is an ever-present companion to getting work done. But bad email practices harm the work we most value—because everything in academic work is connected. Take longer than is needed to email, damage relationships or reputation with email, or fail to recognize that emailing well is a learnable skill. All stand to reduce your precious time, development, and other work.
Yet, because so few of us commit to getting better at email, we receive way too many bad and unnecessary emails. Each consumes time to write and read. Each acts as it’s own little barrier to other work being done too. We need to get better at email, and the time to do so is now.
This month’s Remarkable Resource is linked to our recent University Affairs Column on the “breaking the email curse”. Below you will find a printable version of the acrostic tool—“REDEMPTION”—you can use to focus on improving aspects of your email practices. By prioritizing this, you will benefit yourself, others, and ultimately all the other work you do.